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Organizing your Photos

W

waz

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jan 19, 2004
Messages
131
I am still fairly new to digital photography and have had my new camera for about a month. Over that time I have taken upwards of 500 pictures and have no way to sort them out. Everyday when I come back from shooting I just create a new folder on my desktop and dump all the images from my memory stick there. So what I am looking for is the techniques you guys use to organize the hundreds and thousands of images you guys have in an efficient way.
 
Try using this from Adobe. You can add "tags" to your pics for easy sorting. And you can do some editing of the pictures and it will keep a copy of the original. It's free and easy.
 
I have a photos directory, inside this I have a directory for each year. Inside that I have a directory for each shoot I do, and sometimes I subdivide that too. It works pretty well, but image management is difficult.
 
I'd like to hear some more ideas. I'm somewhat of a pack rat, I guess, and so I keep pretty much every photo I shoot, even if it's almost certainly garbage. Disk space is cheap, but time remains expensive as ever, and it can be hard to keep track of everything.

I organize my photos from the two cameras I use in different ways. For my personal camera, an Olympus E-10, I organize everything purely chronologically. The path looks like Photos/2004/09/04/PMDD####.JPG. It works decently most of the time, but it can be hard to find photos that are more than a year or so old unless I have the filename of a photo to look for (since the filename encodes the month and date). Also, if I take a series of photos spanning multiple days (e.g. near midnight), it's very annoying. This system was supposed to be great, though, since I created an XML format to describe all of the photos and all that; I just never got it all working well enough for it to be useful.

For the work camera, it's organized (almost) purely by "shoot name". I pick some very short phrase that describes the shoot, but of course there is a problem when I revisit a subject. How do I differentiate the photos I took of the dogs this summer from the ones I took around Christmas? It's tough.

So I really intend to end up with something like what commando described, and I'm already on that path, hence the "almost purely". Basically, I just prefix the shoot name with the date, so "2004-12-25 Dogs at Christmas" would be the result. The date format I have there is ISO 8601 standard. It may look odd if you're not used to it, but it's really the way to go: a) it's fairly obvious how to read it (unlike, say, 04/02/03... what date is that?), and b) it sorts properly if you just do a standard lexical/ASCII sort like in typical folder views.

How I organize the "keepers" that I put on my website is a totally different issue, which I won't go into, since you've probably stopped reading by now. :) You can get a feel for it pretty quickly just by browsing, hopefully.
 
My organization is split into a large "My Pictures" folder on my D: drive with misc. obsolete files and folders. Being a pack rat, they're always going to be there unless I decide to burn them to DVD and take them off of the HDD.


Anyways, inside that mess I have folders named like "2004-12 (December)", "2005-01 (January)", etc. I just dump my random photos into that directory, so it usually has ~800 or so photos there for each month. I also have "event folders" that are named like "Basketball 10th - Troy - Grangeville" or "Basketball 20th - Troy Tourney". I usually have ~8-18 of these folders, each with ~100-300 photos each. On average, I dump about 1GB of pictures into each event folder because I only have a 1GB flash card. :p I have a "Keepers" folder in there for things that I processes for my gallery, and that takes up ~300MB-500MB each.


The odd thing is that my online gallery is much more organized than that mess on my computer. If I'm looking for a good picture or an event, I actually go to my gallery first to figure out the file name(s), and then since the date is there I can find my way into the right folder on my PC. My new gallery doesn't have all of my Keepers, but it eventually will, and once I finish programming the backend it will be easy to maintain with a lot of power hidden under the hood. :D
 
My wife and I share photos on a home server based on Windows 2003. We have installed Active Directory and joined our computers to the domain to simplify authentication and resource mapping. We map a P: drive to our server's picture share setup as follows:

Physical path on server = e:\data\pictures
Share name = \\server1\pictures

That way, we're working on the same source.

We have a number of folder categories at the root of the share. E.g. "Baby Shower" "Christmas 2004" etc. Some of the larger categories have subfolders E.g. "Jack" (our newborn son) has subfolders "Sept 04" "Oct 04" etc.

We also have a foler at the root called "New Arrivals" This is where we initially put all the new photos from our cameras until we have time to sort through them and move them to the appropriate folders.

Note: We also use the Roku Picturebridge HD1000 to display the pictures from our server directly onto our TV over our wireless network. This setup has really been working out well for us.
 
I sort by folder using year/month/shoot as subfolders.

I then use google's Picasa to browse them. It takes a while to scan them all the first time, but after that the program seems pretty speedy.
 
I use Exifer to rename all my pictures by date (yyyy-mm-dd - hh-mm-ss) and then upload to folders named by category (friends, scenery, random stuff, etc)
 
For me :
//server/P/____1_____/___2_____

Where 1 is the camera and 2 is the date in 05-12-23 format ...

no super duper programs
 
Here's how i sort my photos.
filesort_by_DatHak512.jpg

edit: if you can't get the pic to work, go here: http://www.deviantart.com/view/13973282/

If you can't understand how i've got it sorted, here's a bad replication of the hirarchy:

top level: [Photos]
2nd level: [YYMMDDshortdescription]
3rd level (optional): Here i'll put a folder called [better] and all my final photos (that go to deviantART or just ones that i like) go here.
4th level: my better photos.

With this scheme i can easily identify my shots by date or subject. If i'm taking pics from, say 11:00p - 1:00a i'll usually just stick them all in a single folder, with the date of the first of the two days. This makes things less confusing. It's also very easy to back my photos up onto DVD using this filing name system as i'll never have an identical folder name, and if i see a folder with YYMMDDblahblahblah anywhere, i'll imediatly know what it is and where it goes.
 
I just use the My Pictures folder and dump there into folders by the date the pictures was taken (Canon's software does that...)
 
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